


Banjou Ryuga's Pocket Horse Divorce

by citrus_ebooks



Category: Kamen Rider Build
Genre: Fake/Pretend Relationship, Hors D'oeuvres, M/M, Mentions of the Rest of the Gang but they aren't prominent enough to warrant character tags, Pre-Relationship, Waltzing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-21 07:35:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12452664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citrus_ebooks/pseuds/citrus_ebooks
Summary: Our heroes navigate a fancy party...and maybe their feelings, too. Ryuga enjoys some tartlets. Sento saves a dance.edit 31/10/2017: now with lovely fanart by peachy!edit 01/11/2017: now with even more beautiful fanart by dalesy walesy!





	Banjou Ryuga's Pocket Horse Divorce

**Author's Note:**

> "bbanjou ryuugas pocket horse divorce by heather "slap my big peach as" lastname has turned from a joke to a gay disaster" - ami 2017

Sento comes back from mingling to meet Ryuga by the edge of the hall. His hands are in his pockets, but he looked like he was being a good boy. A pleasant surprise, considering how Sento had to drag him kicking and screaming to the party.

But it wasn't Sento's choice, really. The invite to the compulsory gala had said "plus one", and despite Sento's bounty of innate charm, dashing good looks, and genius levels of intellect, his opportunities for socialising, let alone romance were… limited, while he chose to devote his time to his darling inventions.

So he had four choices. Because as if he was going to ask anyone from work.

Misora was out. Out cold, sleeping in the bed, not willing to put on anything fancier than her nightgown. Or she'd cut you. Okay. Owner was out too. Sento considered him a friend, so he wouldn't have minded going to the party with him, but he had to hold down the fort at Nascita. Sawa wasn’t an option — she was busy covering the event in search of a scoop.

So that had left… Banjou Ryuga, idiot savant. All things considered, he didn't look half bad once Sento had coaxed him out of the triple plaid shirt ensemble he wore on a daily basis and into a suit. The bowtie Sento had begrudgingly tied for him matched the shade of his fiery personality, and they made a decently pretty pair. The brilliant scientist and his trophy boyfriend. Sento smiled to himself as Ryuga pulled something… slightly hairy? out of his pocket, and popped it into his mouth.

Noticing Sento's smile suddenly twist into a mask of utter shock and disgust, but somehow only picking up on the shock (as idiots are wont to do), Ryuga fishes out another unidentified pocket object, and offers it to Sento placatingly. He intercepts Ryuga's arm with his own before he can even bring that thing anywhere close to his mouth, and hisses out an urgent, " _What are you doing?_ "

Ryuga's face darkens a little, apparently upset that his offering was rejected. "They're horse divorces! I got them from the table over there!", he says. He gestures to the offending horse divorce table. It's an hors d'oeuvres table. Sento points that out.

"It's an _hors d'oeuvres_ table."

Ryuga takes some time to chew on that, as well as another hors d'oeuvre from his pocket, which seems to be napkin-lined and filled with a menagerie of squished up fancy tartlets and veggie slices.

"How was I supposed to know? I got dragged to this dumb fancy science party against my will! Excuse me for trying to enjoy myself when I'm stuck with _you_ for the evening!"

Sento would have fired a scathing, intellectually superior jab right back at him. He would have thoroughly razed Ryuga’s uppity attitude to the ground with mere words, maybe with something along the lines of “Oh, sorry to interrupt your busy schedule of sulking at the café,” but one of Sento’s scientific peers had begun overenthusiastically ushering the couple to the centre of the hall, allowing Sento only the quietest of “ _Idiot!_ ”s.

It was uncharacteristic of Sento to be distracted by anything other than the Wonders Of Science and His Own Genius, but Banjou Ryuga had that effect on him. Banjou Ryuga and his disgusting eating habits and infuriatingly contagious poor decision making had drawn Sento’s attention away from the dimming lights, the slowing music, the gathering of couples on the dance floor. Obviously, they were expected to dance, because they were a couple at party. Hopefully Ryuga would have mercy on him.

Ryuga plants a hand on Sento’s hip, like the calm before the storm. Sento feels Ryuga tense. Surprise, surprise: Ryuga is dreadful, and he dances like a plank of wood, if planks of wood had deep, personal vendettas against the feet of their dance partners. Sento mouths: get your act together, because _ouch_ , he didn’t think dancing would be this painful, and attempts a subtle hostile takeover of the waltz to try and have a semi-romantic looking dance.

Ryuga counters and stomps on Sento’s right foot, hard. Sento drags his plus one out to a balcony.

Squatting down in resignation, Sento worries his fingers through his hair and assesses the situation. “This is terrible… I’ve got a petulant, childish meathead for a date who steps all over my feet and eats hors d’oeuvres out of the pockets of the expensive suit I lent him… ” At this rate, all of his coworkers are gonna know him as the weirdo with the even weirder date.

“Would you just let the horse divorce thing go already? It’s not like you’re doing any better at this social thing!” Ryuga bursts out in his typical blustering Ryuga-brand anger, pushing off from the ornate balustrade he had settled himself on, all sound and fury and trying to make himself look more intimidating, like an animal puffing up its fur.

“I am doing better,” Sento shoots back, rolling his eyes because that was obvious. “I’m not the one emptying out the refreshments and brutalising poor innocent geniuses.” He rises from the squat, surging forward to point an accusatory finger at Ryuga’s awesome pecs, pushing Ryuga back, back, back without touching him until he was pushed up against the balustrade again with no escape.

“Banjou, you’re being unbelievably petty.” (He punctuates this with a poke to the chest.) “Misora’d make a better partner than you, and I’d probably have to drag her comatose body around the dance floor in her nightgown.”

Ryuga bares his teeth, and Sento sighs dramatically, deciding to drop the banter just this once in a bid to actually get something through that muscley head of Ryuga’s, and lets their eyes meet properly. “My reputation is on the line, and this job means a lot to me. Please, if you’re not doing this for me as a friend, can you just treat it as a favour?”

They were almost nose to nose now. Closer than they had been during that disaster of a waltz, somehow. Close enough for Sento to smell Ryuga’s cologne. Close enough for Sento to notice Ryuga’s breath hitch.

His eyes are brown. It’s not a terribly uncommon colour, but like tiny shards of shattered glass buried deep in the earth, flecks of orange and blue gleam. Remnants of his past as a human experiment? That shared part of their histories created an odd bond between them that Sento often found his mind wandering to.

Two experiments who were supposed to become monsters, but instead became… whatever they were now. A “best match”.

Sento observes Ryuga’s expression with a little more than scientific curiosity, eyes flitting over Ryuga’s blown pupils, the slope of his nose, the pink dusting his cheeks, the mole over his mouth. His lips, curved into an indignant pout.

Sento doesn’t move an inch from where he’s cornered Ryuga. He considers enjoying Ryuga’s angry-confused-embarrassed expression forever.

“Damn it!” Ryuga relents, and sighs, exasperated, breaking eye contact to look at the stars, the party they’d left behind, anywhere but Sento’s wide eyes. “You owe me.”

Sento brightens instantly, and bounces out of Ryuga’s personal space. Then his goofy grin shifts into a thin, winding thing, like the smile of a predator, like the surrender he’d wheedled out of Ryuga was some kind of triumph, but he grasps Ryuga’s hands with a surprising gentleness, like they were much closer than they actually were. Moving one hand down Ryuga’s body to his waist and settling it there. Caging him in again as soon as he’d been let go.

Ryuga yelps out a shrill “What are you doing?”, then shakily schools his deer-in-headlights look into something that’s more compliant with his brand. Sento, in all his magnanimity, enlightens him.

“I can still hear the music from inside the hall, no thanks to your yelling. The dance isn’t over yet, so we have another chance to make up for your terrible dancing.” Fixing him with a pointed look, Sento continues, “Lucky for you, my brilliance extends to dance, so if you behave and let me lead, this will be a much more pleasurable experience for both of us.”

Ryuga swallows, and manages a rough “Fine.”

Ryuga softens in Sento’s arms, slow, hesitant. They were pressed close in the warm glow filtering from the gala, like starlight from some distant pinprick in the sky billions of light years away already dead.

But Ryuga.

Ryuga was right in front of him. He burned and Sento somehow found himself succumbing like an astronaut falling into the sun — drifting steadily through cosmic emptiness before being engulfed in his embrace, turning to plasma before being scattered across the vast universe on his solar wind.

Ryuga pulls back. At some point, their clumsy dance had slowed to a stop. “Sento”, he breathes, barely audible, name rolling off his tongue like an afterthought to some silent conversation. Maybe overexposure to him had infected Sento with something strange, some _thing_ burgeoning in his chest, pressing up to his ribcage and beating too close to his heart. Sento supposes he’d caught a case of the bad decisions, because he was suddenly hyper-aware of many things: like the fact that Ryuga’s lips were a lot more attractive when they weren’t set in a pout, and the conundrum of distance between them and his own, and other things. But Sento was always a good problem-solver.

He closes the distance, for just a moment, with a small brush of lips against lips. Sento can’t remember if he’s ever kissed anyone before. He doesn’t care.

Through eyes half-lidded he sees Ryuga’s own, squeezed shut, now fly open, startling like a wild animal. Pushing Sento away, looking for escape. This is terrible, Sento thinks. He’s messed up, he’s gone and got swept up in the moment and trusted his gut feeling instead of his brain. Moving his hands off Ryuga like he’d been burned, retreating before he made any more mistakes.

“Really?” comes Ryuga’s voice from a decent, less-intoxicating distance. “You suck at kissing.”

Sento snaps out of his regret spiral. This is familiar, this is standard behaviour for the two of them. Banter is safe; they fall into trading jabs easier than trading kisses. Ryuga must be attempting to normalize the admittedly very strange situation they were now in. He can play along.

But before he can retort, Ryuga continues. “Guess I’ll have to show you how it’s done.”

Beat.

“Like you could do better, _Casanova._ ”

“You couldn’t kiss your way out of a paper bag, _genius._ ”

Ryuga’s arm snakes back around Sento’s body, oddly purposeful. Taking the lead this time? How cute. Sento obliges him and leans back in. “Best two of three?” Ryuga responds by nudging his nose against Sento’s own, as if drawing him in, or drawing the warmth in his chest out his mouth with each tilt of the head in the form of experimental kisses pressed to Ryuga’s lips, the edge of his mouth, then back to his lips again. Sento moves his hands up to Ryuga’s hair and gently tugs at his dumb braids, breathes in the heady scent of coumarin and spices on his cologne and exhales a sigh into their kiss.

When they finally untangle their limbs, Sento huffs without any bite, “You taste like mouth and hors d'oeuvre.” “And you kiss like a nerd,” Ryuga laughs, chastising him by bumping Sento’s hand with his own. Sento takes his hand. He’s laughing, too.

“We should get back to the party,” Ryuga mumbles.

“Let’s make them wait,” Sento replies, squeezing Ryuga’s hand softly, “just a while longer.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Writing Playlist:  
> Carly Rae Jepsen - Run Away With Me  
> Carly Rae Jepsen - Run Away With Me  
> Carly Rae Jepsen - Run Away With Me
> 
> ok fine there was some ctq in there too. a lot of ctq.
> 
> shoutout to my good friends and beta readers ami, abir, necro, iain, peachy, pretty much anyone who read that post on twitter but ami especially for holding me at gunpoint the whole time, and to you...the reader...!
> 
> beautiful gorgeous fanart by peachy on twitter here! https://twitter.com/sirenapeach/status/925344285700050944  
> and dalesy's amazing lovely fanart on twitter here! https://twitter.com/bugwuv/status/925689319800451073
> 
> Thanks for reading remember to like the fic comment the fic and subscribe the fic for more fics like these


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